1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to the position detection of a movable device. More particularly, the present invention relates to a movable device position detection method and apparatus for detecting the position of a movable device, such as an input device (that is, a mouse or a joystick) or an output device of a portable printer, using an acceleration sensor.
2. Description of the Related Art
To detect the position of a moving input device, such as a mouse or a joystick, an encoder or an inertia sensor is used. However, the encoder has a short lifespan since it is sensitive to mechanical abrasion. The inertia sensor uses a microprocessor to calculate the position of the input device by obtaining an acceleration signal and an angular velocity signal for each coordinate axis. However, to use the inertia sensor, many input/output ports are required to obtain each of the acceleration signals and angular velocity signals of the input device. In addition, the microprocessor takes a long time to synthetically calculate the position of a movable device and transmit the acceleration information through a serial port, due to the amount of information.